I burned out early trying to create an on-line life. In the process, I learned a few things.

Life, in some ways, is all about the search for a panacea, the next great thing that’s going to solve all your problems, get you discovered, shower you with bliss, find you love in all the right places, and bend over, pick up the soap, and hand it to you in the shower. Life on-line, I have concluded, is pretty damn ordinary. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t want to read your musings on your on-line life, so if you skip mine, I applaud you for having something more worthwhile to do for the next ten to fifteen minutes.

Maybe the reason on-line life seems so ordinary (please hear this word as Mena Suvari uses it in American Beauty) to me is I started carving out an on-line life a long time ago, eons in the Internet time zone. Remember the AOL chat rooms back in the mid-1990s? I do. I gotta tell you, those conversations were racier than anything I’ve done on-line since (well, almost). You could jump into a “room” of “thirty somethings” and elbow your way to a conversation with someone of the opposite sex (well, who really knew), then meet them in a private room. We should all shudder at the idea of all those digital social experiments being recorded for posterity on a server somewhere. It was just like being in a singles bar on First Avenue, Manhattan upper East Side in the early 1980s. I even arranged a tryst with a woman (I hoped) in an Amtrak city 100 miles away. I never followed through. For three months, I was addicted like it was blow. Then, almost as quickly, chat just became ordinary.

Before most people knew what a digital magazine was, I launched an on-line news service as part of my editorial responsibilities at a trade publication owned at the time by a Fortune 500 publishing company. Want to guess what year? 1997. In fact, my publisher and I were so convinced digital would overtake print in a few years, we decided to put as much content as possible on-line and reduce the print publication from monthly to six times a year. Boy were we wrong! By the time we both had left the publication, the new owners restored it to monthly, even as they created several new on-line products. That venture was extraordinarily early. We almost destroyed the magazine.

I left a fine career in publishing at the end of of the last century/millenium for a dot.com startup. I was not only going to replicate industry information on-line, I was going to supplement it with hundreds of on-line design and operating “apps” that power plant engineers could use in their daily work. We were creating the “cloud” before anyone was dancing for digital rain. I left the business before y2k ended, but not before experiencing all the fun of C-suite morons running around creating “revenue” out of the barest wisps of murky relationships with people who might actually pay us for something…some day. These same C-suite gurus convinced lots of new employees to take a large chunk of their compensation in stock options. Not me. I was curious, not naive.

More than ten years ago, I joined an early (and in many ways pretty darn productive) writing workshop site called Zoetrope. You reviewed a certain number of short stories or novel chapters by others and then those others would review your stories. Some of the feedback was pretty helpful. Most participants, as in life, just did the minimum to get by. Short works got reviewed more often. Sexy titles got all the attention. Cliques developed in places called “offices.” Some authors were far more adept at figuring out how to use the site for self-promotion. There were some pretty good stories and authors on Zoetrope in the early years. But there was no real policing so you took your chances with titles that sounded good, writers you got to know, etc. In the end, it took too much time and energy to get to something beyond the ordinary.

Maybe you’ll forgive me saying that, as regards on-line life – been there, done that.

Nevertheless, you can’t stick your head in a newspaper forever. Speaking of, I decided at the beginning of 2014 that 2013 would be the last year I’d drag mountains of newsprint to the recycling bin half a block down the alley each week. So I opted for the on-line editions of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. Well, no, I didn’t go cold turkey. Couldn’t you tell by my AOL chat room experience that I’m a chicken shit at heart? So, I kept the Sunday print edition. BUT, six days a week I now read the two papers of record on my iphone. What this has done to my reading and filing habits is interesting. I used to meticulously clip articles from both papers – stuff ranging from client-related items to recipes – and file them. Now I to email to myself important stories.

Surprise! In the time it takes me to get from “reading the papers” to settling in at the computer for work, most of those stories lose their import. That’s usually less than forty five minutes. Saving them on-line is more convenient than clipping and filing, but, you know, it’s just harder to be bothered. Oh, and in the span of three months, I decided I don’t even need the Journal. I quit paying for the on-line subscription. The first few times I emailed myself a WSJ article after that, I’d click on it and a version that gives the first few lines, then fades to white, would pop up.

I also learned a few other things about on-line editions. The publication has you over a barrel. Unless you print everything out (obviating the on-line cache), your archives are not accessible if you don’t pay your subscription. She (in the case of the The Gray Lady, not a gender-bending pronoun) who controls your data controls your life. They also run stories on-line for days and in different departments. I found myself reading the same book reviews not only several times but under different departments – Arts, Books, Culture – and on different days. It reminded me that I don’t remember any of what I read anyway. Going digital helped me acutely understand what I need and what I don’t.

Lingering over the paper each morning is so short now I can’t even get in two cups of coffee. On the other hand, anything I might want to look up later will be available on-line. The same publications I pay for subscriptions will pay or otherwise ensure they are listed at the top of Google searches.

I’ve been writing fiction for almost fifteen years. Today, every author is urged to create their on-line “platform.” Okay, I thought, I’ve completed a novel, I have almost ten short stories published. It’s time. With an extraordinary platform, I could transition from being an energy industry consultant (you tend to mosey away from me at parties after I say that) to a successful author (you tend to lean in at parties when I say that). So, I joined a bunch of on-line writer communities. Well, for the most part, everyone just asks a lot dumb ass questions and you’re supposed to be respectful in answering them. Or someone’s having a meltdown because a cat resembling a New York agent just passed by their window. Or, they want to know what you do to overcome writers block. Even funnier, everyone is trying to promote themselves without looking too much like they’re promoting themselves. Even the sites that caution,”NO PROMOTION!”, are promoting someone, just not you.

One thing you would think writers should know better than anyone: Words are an attempt to communicate, but they don’t always. Words always have a dark side. To someone. Often to lots of people. This is something I learned after twenty years working for a publishing company. Once I wrote an editorial, a eulogy of sorts for some industry colleagues who perished in a commercial plane crash. This, I thought at the time, will be the least controversial thing I’ve ever published. Yet one reader responded vehemently about what I had wrote. He had misinterpreted my closing sentence. One person writing a letter to the editor almost always means many other readers think the same thing.

On-line writing is NOT the same as off-line conversation.

I’ve bought a few books from completely unknown authors peddling their work on-line. So far, the reading experience has been worse than buying from the quarter book pile at the bookstore or a street vendor. Then, there are those authors who could be latter day Steinbecks, but you’re so sick of their “LOOK AT ME!” posts that you wouldn’t buy lemonade from them if they were eight years old and it’s a hundred degrees outside.

How long can yakking with people you don’t know, can’t see, and can’t hear hold your interest? Are Facebook posts really your machete for fighting in a political or cultural argument? Can you get serious responses from the like-minded that you couldn’t get from a book that’s probably sitting on your shelves? Are you asking a question just to avoid a Google search for a dozen good answers (and a thousand not so good)? Am I liking my brother’s post so I don’t feel guilty about not wanting to call him? Do I just need an excuse not to use my time more wisely?

Is any of this improving anyone’s writing, or whatever you do for work and avocation?

Oh, and maybe another reason it all seems so ordinary is that I’ve also worked from home since 1982. Not regularly. That didn’t happen until the late 1980s. What I discovered the one or two days a week I commuted to Manhattan back then was the extraordinary amount of time people wasted in an office environment. My boss, frankly, was the worst offender.

Millions of people working from home make on-line social media a fertile playground. Free agent nation gathers at the on-line water cooler, the digital ambient air for a cigarette with the smoke team, or the virtual lunch room for a meal or a soda. I guess the more people who use something, the more it reverts to the mean.

Have I mentioned all the e-zines, on-line locations, and links across my myriad interests that I have bookmarked? I can count on one hand those I ever returned to. If someone I know and respect suggests an on-line something, I’ll probably check it out. But, contrary to what I thought, I don’t spend quality time perusing my bookmarks for something to do, learn or read. The few blogs that I followed (my daughters’ blogs the exception) were pretty interesting for a while, but they tend to cave in on themselves. I get the core message. I don’t get it when they go off-topic and get personal or political (unless it’s a political blog). I get mad when I realize they’re just building a sales platform, too (usually for a book or their academic work). It’s hard to write something interesting regularly. It’s even harder to write something fresh. Most blog comments are populated by people who have something to gain from being associated with the blogger. Let’s face it, most blogs and comments are excuses to rant, join the choir, take pot shots at someone else’s choir, orshow how smart or clever you are.

Maybe that’s why about 95% of what gets passed around Facebook are slogans, cute contests (“IF YOU WERE A LEAF, WHAT KIND OF TREE WOULD YOU HAVE COME FROM?”), and quick retorts (guilty as charged here!). Getting credit for being alive, attentive, or concerned is a click or a few keystrokes away.

Twitter? I can’t even go there. Not yet. How do you say vertigo in 144 characters?

None of this is to denigrate on-line life totally. Some people are very clever on-line, probably a whole hell of a lot more entertaining than they would be in real life. I’ve gotten re-acquainted with some guys from high school I lost touch with...in high school. We’re different men now. A dear friend of mine just made a plea on Facebook for someone to donate a kidney. Some people use Facebook as their daily offering of poetry, or wise saying, and I would be lying if I didn’t find some of it truly inspirational. There’s one writer person who is either going to land in the psyche ward soon, or write a really great novel, and, given what I perceive as his natural writing talent, I can’t wait to read it, if he publishes it before his hands are strapped behind his back. His agent and publisher will be taking virtual Clorox to all of his on-line posts. Imagine Faulkner drunk and taking a break every few minutes to post. One particularly ravishing blond poet’s glam photo appears so often I click on it hoping it goes to her on-line dressing room. I’ve taken an interest in issues I probably would still be ignoring off-line.

Come to think about it, the world is a better place with some people always on-line.

I’ve been getting some pretty good short stories through an iphone app, perfect for reading something besides People at the dentist office. It’s funny. I appreciate that I don’t come off as some intellectual snob with National Geographic in my lap. At the same time, I can’t help but remember those women on the subway who used to read those steamy romances between innocuous covers or behind a larger magazine.

When I first got married, my spouse wanted to find a church to attend. The only times I had been in a church between ten years old and her desire to attend was (1) a Unitarian church infrequently (hardly counts anyway) as a teenager, (2) because a Baptist woman I was head over heels for at age 22 wasn’t going to give me the time of day if I didn’t, and (3) weddings. After my wife found a suitable church, I used to joke seriously that I attended often enough so that no parishioner would think we were having marital problems.

That’s kind of how I feel about my on-line activity. You don’t have to get with the program but you should understand the program. I post often enough so people know I am still alive. I post when I think I have something useful to say. I post when I can complain but also get credit for being entertaining (hopefully). I answer even dumb ass questions so that someone else might benefit from my experience. I post when I blog (extend that platform!) but I don’t blog too often because it’s really difficult to write a sensible blog piece. Also, true confession (now that you’re close to the end): I write blog posts as much to capture some commentary for myself as I do for someone else to read.

Above all, I post after having learned a few things: (1) I am creating a permanent, indelible digital signature discoverable by anyone with the will and the money; (2) my words can and will be misinterpreted, especially when lifted out of context; and (3) restraint is the better part of valor in digital life.

I participate in social media often enough so people know I have an on-line life. And I know at least something about theirs. I burned out early creating an on-line life before there were on-line lifeforms. I found no panaceas. I acutely understand it takes time and energy to extract or offer something out of the ordinary. Just like real life.